Get Started on Creating a Great PPC Keyword List

In order to take greatest advantage of pay-per-click advertising opportunities, one must first develop a truly great keyword list. The key to a great list is to generate a vast and deep set of search phrases that are targeted to your goods and services. The reason that a vast list is better than a shorter list is this: you are only charged when someone actually clicks on your ad. Therefore, even if the search term gets only 1 quality click per week - you should use it anyway - as it doesn`t cost you anything to use the keyword unless you recieve a productive business lead from it.

Here are a few tips to get you started. First, start with the most basic keyword phrase that describes what you are selling at your site. For our example we`ll use a site that sells specialty dog food. The list of basic keyword phrases might be:

pet
dog food

Let`s start with these. Now, in order to build out a much broader and targeted list very quickly, we will use a great and free online keyword generating tool:

We`ll input our targeted search phrases into the tool and display the top results below. Note that there are often many more than just the results shown below, but the technique described is the same for any additional keyword phrases.

First we`ll input `pet` first (you can then repeat the same process with `dog food` later) - here are the top few results:

Number of Searches in the Previous Month

Keyword Phrase

566,326

pet

252,871

pet supply

113,835

pet store

106,676

apartment for rent with pet

106,473

apartment pet search

105,919

pet finder apartment

105,261

pet shop boy

59,088

pet supply store

56,478

pet grooming

54,566

pet adoption

49,307

pet services

44,527

pet shop

35,043

littlest pet shop

33,044

pet sitting services

32,999

virtual pet

32,955

pet boarding

32,368

pet product

29,962

pet health

28,700

pet for sale

27,790

be your own pet

25,996

pet insurance

22,105

pet name

19,774

pet care

The number on the left refers to the amount of searches conducted the previous month at Yahoo Search Marketing. This gives you an idea of a search phrase`s relative popularity. The next step is to remove those terms that are not related to your business - here is the truncated list:

Number of Searches in the Previous Month

Keyword Phrase

566,326

pet

252,871

pet supply

113,835

pet store

59,088

pet supply store

49,307

pet services

44,527

pet shop

35,043

littlest pet shop

32,368

pet product

29,962

pet health

19,774

pet care

So now we have created 10 good search terms. The next step is to input each of the ten terms back into the Yahoo Search Marketing tool to generate even more search terms. So when we input the search phrase `pet supply` into the tool we get:

Number of Searches in the Previous Month

Keyword Phrase

59,088

pet supply store

9,979

pet supply plus

7,360

wholesale pet supply

6,799

discount pet supply

5,743

online pet supply

3,461

pet supply catalog

2,834

pet bird supply

1,879

pet grooming supply

1,095

pet supply plus store

1,029

online pet supply store

899

pet supply chicago

851

ryans pet supply

754

pet food supply

747

jeffers pet supply

659

cheap pet supply

629

care a lot pet supply

627

dr foster and smith pet supply

538

foster and smith pet supply

522

dog pet supply

497

pet supply distributor

Again, it is important to now remove those terms that don`t apply to your business and arrive at a truncated list. Simply repeat this process over and over with each search term. Your pay-per-click list will soon grow to a large size.

One more step that will really help to generate a larger and even more targeted list. Come up with a list of `prefixes` that describe your store`s niche. So if you are a discount store, your list of `prefixes` may be: discount, affordable, cheap, low cost, economy, etc.

You can then add these `prefixes` to your current search phrase list in order to create an even deeper search list. To use the first ten search phrases we created you would then arrive at a list that contains:

cheap pet

cheap pet supply

cheap pet store

cheap pet supply store

cheap pet services

cheap pet shop

cheap littlest pet shop

cheap pet product

cheap pet health

cheap pet care

Remember to always check the relevancy of the terms you create to make sure that they will be reaching the targeted traffic that will purchase your products and services. Good luck creating your targeted pay-per-click search term list!